A Comparative Study Of Ecological Metaphors In The Economic Keynote Speeches Of Chinese,American And Russian Leaders

In recent years,the cognitive research of metaphor theory has shown a trend of “social turn.” Many researchers have shifted their interests and focused on how people use metaphors to convey their ideas,feelings and values in real discourse.As one of essential theories as well as methods,Critical Metaphor Analysis links a consideration of textual aspects of metaphor to its pragmatics.Economic discourse is an important part of real-world interaction and rich in metaphor.It allows us to perceive the structure of the social world.While against the background that economy has developed rapidly in the past half century,it is presumed that the controversy over economy and ecology always exists.Ecolinguistics is about critiquing forms of language that lead to ecological destruction,and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world.This paper selects the keynote speeches of the leaders of China,the United States and Russia addressing at the international economic conference as the database,and analyzes ecological metaphors in economic discourses on the basis of Critical Metaphor Analysis and Ecolinguistics,revealing the value and ideology embodied in metaphors.The semantic assignment function of the Wmatrix is used to identify metaphors.Through the cross-analyzing of the semantic domains related to “economy” and “ecology,” ecological metaphors can be identified.Through comparative analysis,it is found that there are mainly five kinds of conceptual metaphors in the economic speeches of the leaders of the three countries,namely,DEVELOPING ECONOMY IS PLANTING,ECONOMY IS HUMAN,ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IS A JOURNEY,ECONOMY IS THE WAR and ECONOMY IS LIQUID,among which the farming metaphor is the most frequently used type.In the speeches of Chinese leaders,farming metaphor appears most frequently,human metaphor the second,and journey metaphor the third;in the speeches of American leaders,farming metaphor ranks the first;war metaphor the second,and human metaphor the third;in the speeches of Russian leaders,the most commonly used metaphor is also farming metaphor,the second is journey metaphor,and the third is war metaphor.In addition,this paper finds that food metaphor only exists in the speeches of Chinese leaders,and fire metaphor only exists in the speeches of American leaders.This thesis attempts to summarize the similarities and differences of metaphors used in different corpus,interprets the concepts,ideologies and values implicitly conveyed through metaphorical thinking,and explain reasons from cognitive,cultural and economic perspectives.The analysis proves that cognitively,human’s similar perception of the world generates a large number of identical or similar metaphors;culturally,differences of environment and value system lead to different propensity as for the use of metaphors;economically,the different phases or levels of economic development also influence the choice of metaphor.